It always was going to be the year of my life. I just didn't think it would be quite like this!

The book's about your childhood, and each chapter is centred on an animal that featured heavily in your life. Why?

I could kid myself that I wasn't really writing about me, although I think it is horribly revealing about me.

And about your (human) family. It's quite hard-hitting, isn't it?

It's not a children's book. It's an adult's book... It is a very dysfunctional family, and who wants a functional one? We all, in our way, have dysfunctional families.

Are you a bit of an anthropomorphiser?

Oh, totally. Certainly through childhood, that's how you connect with animals. They're people in your family. And if you could spend every minute of every day with them you would. And obviously if they could talk, your conversations would be two-way instead of one-way... you just want to hear them say "I love you too". That's why it's a discovery about love, of course it is.

You grew up in a horse-racing family. [Balding's father is the horse trainer Ian Balding, who trained several horses for the Queen.] It seems like a strange world. Is it?

Yes! It's a big, big goldfish bowl, and it's a successful one, but it's almost entirely self-contained. It doesn't even connect that much with other sports, apart from footballers who have racehorses.

Though you've added masses of sports to your portfolio as a presenter.

I needed to prove that I could present on television or radio, not that I could present racing. When I started in radio, luckily I had a boss who said: "You sound great doing the racing results. If you can sound like that on everything else, then we're getting somewhere."

You've been a huge hit this summer. Do you know why?

I genuinely don't know. I think I was very lucky in where I was positioned – for example, the swimming was fantastic. But also I've been doing it a long time now: I'm 41, and yet this is my fifth Olympic Games. It's long enough to know how to get through it, so you pace yourself properly, and you know what you need to know.

It's been quite a challenge, though. How have you coped?

It makes me completely useless as a partner, friend, daughter, sister. I've been hopeless this summer for anyone else's sake, but I'm all right on the telly!

Whether it's on the telly or on the page, you seem to have a nose for the good story.

The fun is in the minute detail. During the Olympics and Paralympics, I've said to athletes, "Look, when you get asked what does this mean to you, or what does it feel like" – which they get asked endlessly – "make it tiny. Don't go for the big thing, where you say, 'This is a dream', or 'This is all I've ever wanted'. Go for the tiny thing, the thing that a four-year-old said to you, something small, because that's what connects with people."

It's true: in your book the story about you shooting your breakfast across the table at the Queen is funny because of the sausage-marmalade combo. It works because you're eating something disgusting!

It's really nice though. Have you never tried it? I still have it occasionally.

The Queen isn't the only royal in the book. What about when you cut Princess Anne up when you were both jockeys in an amateur race?

I had a very clear dream last night that Princess Anne had quite a long chat with me about that. I'm clearly haunted by it.

It was bizarre, it was extraordinary, it was immensely privileged in many ways, but I think it also contained a lot of the day-to-day struggles that a lot of parents have with children. I was on the edges of high society but wasn't in it. And my mother being from a very, very well connected family and my father not at all, that conflict of class is very real to me. I get it. I understand it. And I think that's quite an interesting position to be in. And, gosh, if I ever get into writing novels...

Will you?

God, I'd love to!

Any temptation to be the next Dick Francis?

I don't think so! I think you have to write what you find flows. And that was the interesting thing about writing this. It did start to flow so easily.

You write very forcefully about the imbalances between boys and girls and men and women when you were growing up.

I still think it's an eternal struggle of gender equality. It's true now, it was true then, it's certainly true in other countries now. Why are we so clearly defined by gender? Why are there things that are boys' things to do and girls' things to do, and who is that benefiting? I could have sugar-coated that hugely. I make that big because I want to show a mirror to an awful lot of people and say: "Look, you're doing this. You're doing this to your children. As soon as they're born you're putting girls in pink and boys in blue."

How did it affect you?

I was just a bit of a misfit. I was a misfit from very early on and I don't know why, and I'll probably never know why, but it's sort of about the struggle to fit in and then realising that you don't want to fit in. Fitting in is boring. But it takes you nearly your whole life to work that out.

Do you think people will be surprised to discover that you were a child kleptomaniac?

Not my teachers! They knew all about it. Yes: but in a way that was terribly cathartic because for a long time that was the most shameful thing that had happened to me, and I hated it if people brought it up, or if I thought it was going to be brought up. That was an awful thing. It was a shameful secret, so I feel much better now everybody knows. I was a shoplifter. There we are. Full stop. And I got caught.

The book ends when you're 19, although you give us a summary of your adult life in an epilogue. Describing the development of your sexuality, you write that you realised you'd been "looking in the wrong section of the library". But it must have been a little more involved than that?

Yes, obviously it was, but that's quite deliberately not the story. People like to think of you as a certain person, or a certain type of person, and they do love to give you a label. We like luggage labels, and we like people labels. The interesting thing that's happened this summer is that I'm a presenter, and not even necessarily just a sports presenter, and certainly not any longer a lesbian presenter. So I think in that sense there's been a shifting of attitude, because now everybody knows and it's just part of the story but it's not the most interesting thing.

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